Vow to Protect

I continue pumping my fist up and down my length while I tease my senses with the little hints of Val she gave me last night. The soft soap scent wafting from her skin. No perfume, barely any makeup, and that fucking hair.

I groan, pumping faster now as I imagine my fingers twisting in the strands, brushing it from her face while I fuck her tight hot body. Again, I picture her unbound length spread across my white sheets and waking up with it draped across my chest and her thighs between mine. How she’ll look at me in wonder while I lick her cunt for the very first time. Because I know fucking Sal hasn’t been doing a damn thing to pleasure her during their engagement. In fact, I doubt she’s ever had a man between her thighs.

A fucking virgin. The thought makes me shoot my load on the marble, and I spend longer than usual pumping myself as I come down from the fantasy. When I release myself, I’m thinking about the innocent smile she gave me and realize I’m back to fucking peace.

She will belong to me one day, but I’ll never be able to have peace. Not while my mother’s killer is still alive. And not while I have an entire society to bring to heel under my control. My father managed it effortlessly until his age got the better of him, but I’m not quite ready to earn my crown in a river of blood. Maybe after I claim Val and Christmas comes early.

The thought of her fiancé’s blood spilling across black concrete chases away the sour mood I felt building. I usually didn’t take joy in killing. If I had to do it, I had to do it, but him...no, I’d be more than fucking happy to insert a bullet into his pervert of a brain and then watch him shit himself as he dies.

I grab the towel off the rack, then quickly dry off and dress before stepping out of my suite in the hall. The maids have already been through, but I hear the murmur of someone toward the dining room of my penthouse condo.

Breakfast should have been finished hours ago. When I enter the room, I find Kai, my best friend and the leader of my unruly band of enforcers, talking on the phone. He’s speaking Portuguese too fast for me to keep up.

When I step into the room, he quickly ends his call and shifts to face me. “Did you talk to Novak’s daughter last night?”

I take the seat beside him at the round glass table and survey the black suit he’s wearing today. “Ermenegildo, is it? Do I pay you enough to afford a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of fabric?”

“Ari,” he says, his tone edged with reproach. He’s the only one who can call me by the name I used as a child—the name she called me. And he’s the only fucking one who can use that tone of voice when he says it.

“It wasn’t as if I planned to speak to her. She stepped out of the restroom when the twins were escorting someone out of the stairwell. Would you prefer I ignore her and make a scene?”

His eyes narrow. “The way I hear it, you did make a scene when you kissed her knuckles in front of her fiancé.”

Back to fucking Sal, and my good mood evaporates into nothing. “Oh, did the big bad child trafficker call to tattle on me?”

Kai sits back, his dark skin catching the light from the window on the far side of the room. “We can’t move on Novak yet. If you rile Viktor and his partners, it might change something that we won’t be able to account for in enough time to adjust the plans.” Now he’s calm, using a tiger tamer voice as if it will keep me from marching out the door and dumping Sal into oncoming traffic.

A maid comes into the room carrying a tray of coffee, and I snag a mug as she sets it between us. When she leaves again, I meet Kai’s eyes. “I told you it meant nothing. Now drop it. If Sal is upset, well, he should know better than to make a fuss. The fact that he doesn’t know better worries me more than anything. Usually weasels like him have a strong sense of self-preservation. If he feels confident, then there has to be a reason he feels that way.”

Kai takes a sip of his own coffee. “He is about to marry Novak’s daughter. Maybe he thinks Novak’s position in the society will shield him?”

I shrug and slick back the wet curls from my face. Eventually, it will dry that way and stay in place, but for now, it pisses me off. But not enough to take ridicule from one of my five for asking them to buy me a blow dryer. Maybe I’ll shave it off and be done with it.